The Weekly Standard Is Dying a Surprisingly Standard Death

Political magazines depend on the largesse of motivated patrons for their survival. When the patrons lose interest—or run short on cash—the magazines expire unless other moneybags can be located to cover the losses. Following that eternal script, the Weekly Standard appears close to folding because its current patron—and most important reader—billionaire conservative Philip Anschutz, has grown tired of it. He better favors his other conservative political publication, the Washington Examiner, which his company announced plans on Monday to “expand into a national distributed magazine with a broadened editorial focus.” In other words, the Standard is dying so the Examiner can live larger.

That’s a little simplistic, but probably not far from the mark. The Standard has remained a determinedly never-Trump magazine in a time when fewer and fewer conservatives—especially elected conservatives—are willing to take that stand, and this has marginalized the magazine in the current conservative movement. Increasingly, it’s all political thought leader and no thought followers. The magazine has been unable or unwilling to tack with the Trump current the way National Review has.

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A publication can thrive as an all-leader-and-no-follower organ if it positions itself as the opposition. But the Standard’s problem, of course, is that its oppositional politics have pitted it against a president who most conservatives support. If the publicity-shy Anschutz were a never-Trumper, he might continue to fund the magazine as an act of defiance, as political magazine owners before him have. But he isn’t. Although he’s said to disdain Trump, giving the insulting amount of $250 to his 2016 campaign, he isn’t a never-never-Trumper, either, hence his reluctance to fund the Standard's holy war against the president.

Launched in 1995 as the Gingrich revolution reached peak gyration, the magazine gained instant influence in Washington politics, giving its founding patron, Rupert Murdoch, a voice in mainstream politics, making him a very happy No. 1 reader. By 2000, the Standard was exploiting that influence to try to place its favorite son, John McCain, in the White House. McCain’s nonideological conservatism made him a perfect match for the amorphous “American Greatness” creed that co-founder and editor William Kristol and his then wingman, David Brooks, had been pushing from the early days of the magazine. Steadfastly neoconservative in its editorials, the Standard led the charge for the Iraq War. Its pro-war policies, which were disastrous when embraced by President George W. Bush, added to the magazine’s mystique: What other publication in the past 100 years can claim to have helped start a war? Aligning itself with Bush, the magazine used its proximity to speak directly to power for almost a decade.

The magazine’s next great moment came when McCain, its 2008 candidate, won the Republican presidential nomination. Its third, and greatest, moment came when McCain put Sarah Palin, Kristol’s pick, on the bottom half of his ticket. These triumphs didn’t last long, much to the disappointment of the magazine. Palin turned out to be a nut and, as it turned out, the only time a viable national constituency for McCain ever coalesced was during his funeral.

The Obama years were good for the Standard, too, but political cachet has a short shelf life. Billionaires don’t mind losing $1 million a year on a magazine, as Murdoch was on the Standard in the 2000s. But only a resolute billionaire will put up with those sort of losses if the money buys him no influence. Anschutz probably thinks, rightly, that selling the Standard to some conservative hedge-funder so that it would survive would be a mistake. Why create unnecessary competition for his Washington Examiner? Better to poach the Standard’s subscription list for Examiner subscribers.

Having read most if not all of the issues published, I’ll mostly miss its deeply reported features on culture, politics, science, religion and more that its star writers, Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, Brooks, Christopher Caldwell, Tucker Carlson and Peter J. Boyer, to name a few, have contributed over the years. Like the Kinsley-era New Republic, in whose shadow it was formed, the Weekly Standard was at its best when most argumentative.

“We're somewhat self-consciously trying to be the voice of the new conservative era,” Kristol’s co-founder, Fred Barnes, told the Washington Post when the magazine launched in 1995. The magazine never lost its voice, it just lost the conservative movement.

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I even came to enjoy the movie reviews of my former nemesis, John Podhoretz! Send your Standard loves and hates via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts fell hard for Sarah Palin. My Twitter feed favored David French for president. My RSS feed started a war between my email alerts and my RSS feed.